In short. Google+ is thriving, but we decided to shut down Google+ Games. Look away... Look away.
If you paid for anything contact the companies that are already tired of us and have them solve your problem. Oh and by the way, try our new Google Play Game Service! Hurry, before it's gone!
Sorry for the snarky comment. I usually don't make these types of comments but shutting down a service, asking users to do the leg work to solve game credit problems, and then marketing a new service in the same post bugs me.
The "shut it down, you lose all your stuff, and we're starting over" strategy worked for Amazon and ereaders (result: Kindle), but hasn't so much for Microsoft and music (result: Zune marketplace).
I think I remember getting a few "promotional" ebooks from them before. Interestingly, if I go to my "account" page and look for "Your Media Library," one of those links takes me to all of those. So, if you are referring to that effort, you can still get to them. I don't know why they did not unify these with the kindle.
That's something that makes me afraid to invest more time in learning Go language.
What if after investing my time in learning Go, one day I'll see Google blog post saying:
"Go lang project at Google is shutting down, we will no longer develop that. But don't worry we decided to donate that project to Apache Software Foundation! It is now called Apache Go. Look for in ASF incubator, just next to Apache Wave (formerly known as Google Wave".
Go is not a service, it is a language and runtime with open-source implementations. If Go is worthwhile, it will survive even Google shutting down. I don't see why you would find Go under Apache to be bad news.
Same argument could be applied to Wave (which also featured an open-source client, server and protocol implementations), or OpenSocial (which also featured an "open" set of standards) and yet without a strong and motivated backer such projects stop feature development and fade into oblivion.
1) If Google ditched Go, it would hardly be the only open source language without a corporate backer. Languages without corporate backers cannot be said to categorically "stop feature development and fade into oblivion."
2) Nobody gave a shit about Wave or OpenSocial, even when Google was backing them...
Almost, except Wave is a specific product that didn't find an audience. Go is a general purpose language and it already has users outside of google to care for it.
I don't understand these complaints at all. GCC has a Go frontend for fuck sake. Google "shutting down" Go makes as much sense as AT&T "shutting down" C++ and C.
Motion seconded. As someone who's worked with more languages than I care to count, I think Go really is a great contribution. It's not just that there are big names behind it. I have little doubt that it will stand on its own merits precisely because of how its creators' experience and clarity of purpose manifest in pragmatic language design.
FWIW, I'm also really enjoying getting into Rust[1]. At a distance, it's easy to confuse their purposes: both Rust and Go are superficially "new-world systems languages". But the goals and influences of each differ considerably, and this becomes manifest as you dig into them.
[1] Caveat: Rust is definitely still in its pre-release lifecycle. As such don't expect to launch your-next-great-whatever to production with it. But it's a great time for language and software enthusiasts to jump in and have fun.
One of my biggest problems with Go is that what the authors say it is for and what people using it for are 2 different things. The authors say it is to replace systems languages, and as far as I know they've never retracted that position, whereas in the wild it's being used instead of Python and other similar scripting languages.
I think that's simply a misunderstanding of what "systems language" means. It does not mean "go write an operating system", even though that's an application that comes to mind because of C.
From the top of golang.org: "Go is an open source programming environment that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software." That's a pretty general statement. Follow on with this one from [1]: "Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language." They're pretty clear that they want to have their cake and eat it too, regarding the benefits of these language classes.
For more color on Go's origins, focus, and design, I highly recommend the "Go at Google" talk by Rob Pike, available as video [2] or an edited article version [3].
It's not a misunderstanding at all. From day one the target was C/C++. The initial demos were all about how fast Go compiles compared to C++.
Hell, that FAQ makes it pretty clear what the target is. Please read "What is the purpose of the project?" and tell me how the target is anything but C/C++...
Such is the risk with doing anything on Google these days. G+ will likely eventually be killed off too. Though it may take years. Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android and Analytics I think are probably safe. Only slightly joking.
I'm shocked and surprised! How is that possible? after all this was going to be yet another amazing google product built by bunch of smart people that made it through 12 rounds of interview process. To paraphrase, "people with no imaginations hire people with no imagination" :)
All shutting down Google+ Games means is that the integration of web games with the Google+ UI is going away in favor of piecemeal integration. Google+ Games is essentially the old Facebook model that even Facebook-linked games are using less, the new model (supported by Google Play Game Services, Google+ SSO, the Google+ Moments API, etc.) is of games (quite often native mobile games rather than web games) that interact with a support platform through a sign-on API, cloud services that provide saves/multiplayer toos/leaderboards/acheivements, and systems that allow integration with social network news feeds.
I'm surprised by how many technical people are butt hurt over every subsequent shutdown of a service after Google Reader. It sucks to invest time and effort into something that was assumed to exist, however naively, forever. On the other hand, if we were to hold on to every design and implementation we've ever created without the ability to throw it away, no matter whom or what depends on it, our technological progress would probably be slowed.
Could you imagine if every piece of code you wrote once it was functioning, couldn't be thrown away and you had to support it forever once it existed? That would blow.
It's much like backwards compatibility decisions. Sometimes you gotta break free.
Just breathe, remember it's not the end of the world, and if you're on the self entitlement band wagon, you're going nowhere fast.
What annoys me is it's become a bandwagon for karma. Half the people bitching at Google for shutting some service down probably never even used the service.
Companies kill unpopular or bad products. Google is not unique.
When they launched Games on G+ I was pretty excited. I went to play and was greeted with "Games are social!" along with a prompt to share all my social networking info with 3rd parties. Decline and you can't play. Games are social? I'm supposed to hear "social" and just enthusiastically agree to that? Sorry, but no. I never went back.
One thing that's missing from the timeline is equivalent services that Google have launched/purchased. For example, Google Video didn't so much 'shut down' as merge with (the arguably better) Youtube.
As a shareholder of Google, it's encouraging for me to see that Google shuts down products that didn't work out really really fast (Nexus Q and now Google+ Games).
FWIW, I generally find that the majority of referral traffic to the Fogbeam Blog is from Reddit, with Hacker News and/or Twitter next, possibly Slashdot if we got something on there, and then G+ and "everybody else". Until a week or so ago... for the first time, I noticed some posts that we put up where we got more traffic from G+ than from Twitter.
Yeah, it's just one anecdote, and there are all sorts of possible reasons, but it definitely appears that G+ has it's niche in some regards. It might not ever displace Facebook as the main 'generic' social network, but it's no tumbleweed filled wasteland like some people would lead one to believe.
There are plenty of fantastic ideas, worked on by smart people, at good companies, that fail.
Maybe G+ Games would have been good if Google had listened to the right people, but we don't know that, eh?
I know that I'm probably reading too much into some of your Google posts, but they make me sad. I hope you manage to find something (peace? comfort?) and move on. Like I say, I'm probably mis-reading your posts and maybe I'm talking nonsense.
Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?
Google+ Games was not successful. I don't think it's that kind of community. So it makes sense to shut it down if no one was using it. Wouldn't you agree?
Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't think any of us here in the peanut gallery have enough information to really say. I mean, we can - I suppose - take Google at their word that it wasn't "successful" but we don't know things like:
1. Why wasn't it successful?
2. How are Google defining "successful" here?
3. Are there other decisions or investments that could still be made to make it more "successful"?
4. What are the possible n-th order effects of having a Games ecosystem, even if it isn't seemingly "successful" in isolation?
4.5 - what are the n-th order effects of the shutdown notice? How will developers react to this? Does it damage trust in Google as a brand? Will there be "downstream" fallout from this?
5. What, if anything, does this say about the possibility of an "apps" (non game) ecosystem within G+?
6. Etc.
Now I'm not saying Google are wrong to do this... from their perspective it may well be the right decision. Or it might not. Even companies full of very smart people don't always make good decisions on everything.
Because the desktop as a target for casual gaming is pretty much dead and the social network desktop web site as a portal to web-based casual games is likewise pretty much dead; Google+ Games was an implementation of Facebook's social-network-web-site-as-portal-for-web-based-casual-games model. A model which even games that integrate with Facebook (for signon, finding opponents, and posting to the Facebook stream) are abandoning in favor of native (usually mobile) games interacting through APIs but not integrating with the social networks Web UI. That model was past its peak when Google+ Games was introduced, and is pretty much dead now (and G+ has much less legacy motivation to retain support for it than Facebook does), so its out the window.
> 4. What are the possible n-th order effects of having a Games ecosystem, even if it isn't seemingly "successful" in isolation?
Irrelevant, because Google isn't abandoning the idea of having a "Games ecosystem", even one with interacts with Google+ deeply, they are just recognizing that the way to do that isn't to restrict that ecosystem to the G+ Web UI as a portal. That's why the announcement that Google+ Games was being phased out was pretty much simultaneous with the announcement of the availability of the cross-platform (iOS/Android/Web) Google Play Game Services API. (Which is integrated with Google+ -- it subsumes Google+ Sign-On.)
> 5. What, if anything, does this say about the possibility of an "apps" (non game) ecosystem within G+?
The apps-within-social-network-web-interface model, which was dominated by games, is basically dead in favor of apps (including games) that interact with social networks via an API but which are not web applications integrated with the social network web API as the exclusive portal through which they are accessed. So, insofar as you refer to that model for G+ when you refer to an apps ecosystem "within" G+, you should probably take the shutdown of G+ games as a recognition that Google has little current interest in that model.
As far as an ecosystem of apps (both web and native [especially mobile, in the latter case]) which integrate with G+ features like the message stream, Hangouts, profiles, etc., the recent pushes behind G+ for SSO, the Moments API, the Hangouts API and the move to raise the profile of Hangouts, etc., should be a clue there.
I don't get why everybody is so whiny and bitchy about what Google does and does not. It's a public company that's in it for money and all the stuff they make and you use for free - be it good or not; costs a lot of money to maintain and host and develop and all that.
It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for the love of god people...
I'm really not sure why your reply is attached to my comment above. I'm not bitching about anything, just observing some random thoughts that one could apply to this sort of decision. I don't begrudge Google anything for shutting down G+ Games, as I never played the first one of them, nor was I ever likely to.
It's not their responsibility to privately mail you their road map and spendings and ask your opinion about what to do with their money. I hated when they close products I'm using and I do use a lot of google stuff. But .... for the love of god people...
Riiight, not sure if that was meant to be directed to my reply, or if that was happenstance, but I certainly don't claim that Google have a responsibility to mail me anything or solicit my opinion on anything.
That said, it's pretty clear why people make a big deal out of these announcements: Google are so large and powerful and have such a disproportionate amount of influence over what happens on the Web these days, that everything they do impacts a lot of people and likely has ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem. So it's hardly unreasonable for people to take notice and comment on this stuff.
I'm pretty sure the OP wasn't expressing anything of the sort.
That said, the time invested by the developers on the platform and money spent on in-app purchases (via Google's in app purchasing platform) isn't free.
I'm not going to shed crocodile tears for the likes of Zynga or people that buy far too much credit on their games, but I think Google can and do have a little responsibility towards those groups which they're shamefully abdicating with the style and timing of this announcement.
If you're willing to require your players to use modern browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and don't care about social network integration, then http://www.webrtc.org/ should be a great alternative.
> I think the killer feature was ability to use "Hangout" with G+ Games.</blockquote>
Apps (games or not) can still interact with Hangouts via the Hangouts API, which is not affected by G+ Games shutting down.
> Sigh! I had a half baked card game (where seeing other peoples faces was a critical element) that I was planning to implement on G+.
Aside from embedding the game in the G+ Web UI, what are you missing that you would have had with G+ Games with existing G+ APIs (Hangouts, Moments) and the Google Play Game Services API?
AFAICT, shutting down G+ Games just means that the Google+ UI as a portal to web games is going away.
can someone explain to me why people view service shutdown's (by Google in particular, it seems) as some kind of epic betrayal?
In every other industry, discontinuing a product is a non-event. In fact, even within the software industry its usually a non-event. Nobody is out there screaming havoc when Goodyear tire discontinues a product line that wasn't selling well. Google isn't allowed to do the same?
I have some concerns over that too, but ingress is completely independent, which means, if they really don't see it fitting into their strategy they can either spin it off of sell it to another company, hopefully.
Yes Google reader is somewhat independent too, but at least it has "Google" in its name. They can't spin it off of sell it.
During the IO stream yesterday, they talked a good deal about Ingress. I think you are safe for now. You may even want to check in on some of their current IO promotions.
Depends on your personality. If you enjoy stuff like Geocaching, it would probably be fun, but if you live in an area with a limited amount of portals or don't like travelling outside your regular area, not so much.
Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at least, have to view me as human garbage that was right. Progress, one day at a time.
(My idea that was that we should engage independent developers and provide the resources to integrate them with Hangouts, thus having a double win because we'd both (a) get people comfortable with Hangouts and (b) have a higher quality of games than if we published Zynga dreck.)
> Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage
> for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at
> least, have to view me as human garbage that was right.
Your manifestos were treated with astonishing patience and consideration, given their content and your reaction to criticism.
As I recall, your position was that Google+ Games should prefer intricate rulesets based on obscure board- and card-games on the basis that popular casual games are not sufficiently complex to pose an intellectual challenge.
It seems unlikely that positioning Google+ Games as the place to go for half-baked Catan knockoffs would have made it more popular.
Which is not helped by a follow-up of "the most interesting thing about this news item (or, at least, the only thing worth my time to comment on) is that I was correct, generally speaking, and shall now espouse my belief that I'm owed recognition for it."
And still is really sad that Google employees still waste time creating memes about Michael in their stupid internal memegen site many months after his departure.
I have no idea about your past, and I try to read your posts with an open mind, but it's starting to sound increasingly like you have a severe persecution complex. The entire company treated you like "human garbage" and didn't appreciate your gifts? Isn't that a little hyperbolic?
Part of the challenge in working with large groups of people is convincing them that your ideas have merit. That's not unique to Google or any company -- that's just the psychology of social interactions. It sounds like you have an unreasonable expectation that everyone bow down immediately and unquestioningly to your opinions, and leads me to wonder if you have delusions of your own grandeur.
Learning how to interact with people seems to be a skill that you have not acquired, and it certainly makes me want to never work with you.
See, I neither want nor expect anyone to "unquestioningly" listen to my opinions and ideas. That would be a disaster. I have a lot of good ideas, but I have some bad ones too.
What I can't stand is when people don't make the fucking effort to reach the right idea, but just fall back on rank. That will make me very angry.
If they'd given me an explanation of why my idea wouldn't work or why they had to do things a certain way, I would have been happy with that. They could have brought me into a few of the meetings so I'd see how the sausage is made, and maybe I'd realize some of the constraints they were under and see why my idea wouldn't work in that context.
I do, however, expect to be treated as an equal, and I'll raise hell if I'm not. That doesn't mean my ideas are taken without question. Shit, how could anyone even want that? The yes-man behavior (taking someones' ideas without question) isn't respectful; it sets a person up for future embarrassment.
Interesting, your comment didn't do much to change my initial impression. Allow me to explain why, and I mean this as hopefully constructive criticism:
> What I can't stand is when people don't make the fucking effort to reach the right idea, but just fall back on rank. That will make me very angry.
Optimal decisions are rarely made by groups of people, which is part of the challenge of working with people. It's understandably upsetting, but if this bothers you so much, you should consider: (a) changing jobs if the person pulling rank is unreasonable, or (b) working out the power structure and on your relationships and communication to get your point across better.
> They could have brought me into a few of the meetings so I'd see how the sausage is made, and maybe I'd realize some of the constraints they were under and see why my idea wouldn't work in that context.
It sounds like you were cut out of the decision-making process. Perhaps your superiors were genuinely unreasonable, in which case you should have done what everyone in an unreasonable work situation should do: switch teams, or switch jobs. Alternatively, if your real-world interactions convey as much arrogance and petulance as your online rants do, then you're maybe losing out because people don't find it productive to bring you into the decision-making process. Perhaps you're right, but perhaps the way you communicate turns people off. I'm just laying out some alternate possibilities, since your posts seem to convey that everyone was against you.
> I do, however, expect to be treated as an equal, and I'll raise hell if I'm not.
Perhaps you're not earning peoples' respect with this attitude. It sounds a bit like what my 5-year-old does when he thinks we're being unfair to him.
EDIT: You're obviously intelligent, but you have to realize that there are other intelligent people, and all things being equal, most people would rather work with someone who can communicate.
I hope it's obvious that when I proposed the idea, I did not do so with the anger that I am showing now.
Also, I'm not that angry about the mishandling of G+ Games. I wasn't even on that team, so it's not a big deal. That's just one symptom of an underlying problem, which is the dishonesty that exists when a company is marketed as open and engineer-centric but was taken over by managers several years ago.
Google is a bank with worse pay. If it admitted as much-- you'll be working in a closed-allocation environment, because we're now a bank-- I would fully respect that.
You write some great posts on HN, but every time Google is so much as mentioned you descend into this same persecution complex. I wish you wouldn't, but I'll try to talk about this in generalities:
"Ha, my negativity has been vindicated by failure!" is never a good public stance to take. Not for you, nor for the people who disagreed with you. It is a victory for you, but it's one to internalise. The people who were there and complete strangers will think less or you for gloating otherwise. Know that you were right, apply the lesson in the future.
Apropos nothing: as many readers of my own comments will happily attest, it is easy to both be right and behave like "human garbage" (or whatever non-hyperbolic term you'd like to substitute for that one).
My manager at Google had a 5-year-long history of using fake performance problems to tease out peoples' health issues, and then using that information to fuck with them. (For one case, there's a year-long record of meetings moved to conflict with therapy sessions.) HR did absolutely nothing about him because he had a reputation for "delivering" in spite of his known sadistic behavior. (I spent months investigating this shit, and went places I didn't belong.)
Oh, and Google is one of those stuck-up companies where if you get a bad performance review, you can never move to another project.
It finally ended up being up to me to expose that manager (which I did after finding my next job) and when I did, I experienced some extremely unprofessional attacks. Someone (possibly my ex-manager) found out where my next job was and called in a hit.
Given that, I'm justified in enjoying Google's stumbles.
If this were just about me being unlucky, I'd be able to do that.
The problem is that these things are common. They happen all the time, and they keep happening to people all over the place, and nothing is done to these fuckers. That's what makes me fucking angry.
The guy pulled that shit for years and HR not only did nothing, but repeatedly kept people from moving away from him. Same story, five fucking years, over and over, and they did nothing.
One bad manager is just life. A company that deliberately allows them to thrive for supposed project expediency gains has no right to use the motto: Don't Be Evil.
I had a bad manager at google too thanks to the wonders of blind allocation. And I have vented about that experience several times on here. It was cathartic, and now it's out of me. But the price of doing so is that I'll probably never be able to get a job there again. Still, there are far worse things that can happen in life.
So as someone who went through something similar after diving headfirst into the Googleplex without a helmet, can I suggest that you really ought to move on for your own good and let karma eventually catch up with these guys?
It's magical what they'll do to themselves in the long run - it just takes time. I already saw one round of comeuppances after the dotcom boom. It really works because eventually they cross the wrong person at the right time and the universe balances the equation all on its own.
So as someone who went through something similar after diving headfirst into the Googleplex without a helmet, can I suggest that you really ought to move on for your own good and let karma eventually catch up with these guys?
The problem is that the career system (especially in software, which has this hypocritical sense of itself as a meritocracy) is the most elaborate system of victim-shaming ever devised.
I'm almost 30 and my IQ is over 150. I should be an EIR or doing cutting-edge machine learning work, and I'm not, because I was robbed by those fuckers.
Yes, they'll get their comeuppances. I'm sure they'll fall into the wrong fight. But I suffer every day from what those pieces of shit stole from me. I'm years behind where a person at my level of talent should be. Some of it is my fault, some of it is not, but the rest of the world sees it as 100% a reflection on me.
Work is the only society in which being robbed is treated as 100% the victim's fault. If your boss steals from you by giving you shitty work experience and then ruining your career, you are the subhuman piece of shit that deserves to die, not him.
You're not even 30 and you're speaking as though your career is over and your chances of ever doing cutting edge stuff are gone. Your life is to a certain extent what you make it. Stop looking back at the crap times with regret otherwise you'll end up a bitter old man.
And stop thinking that your IQ entitles you to anything. I scored 175 on an IQ test (Cattell III B - probably equivalent to 147 on the test you took) and I work doing CRUD apps for an insurance broker for $40000. I'll never work for Google or a company like that much as I'd love to. Your IQ test score is nice - and great for showing off - but it doesn't entitle you to anything. You need to earn your career.
When I was 30, I was making a tenth of what I'm making now and in the middle of destroying my career by exposing faked data in the wonderful world of science. You think Google is bad? Try getting threatened by a prominent member of the National Academy of Science because you caught him red-handed.
Needless to say, I was very successful at destroying my career. But much like the guy who got turned into a newt, I got better.
You're going to live past 100 assuming you don't get hit by a truck or an asteroid, the game's barely started. Go do something amazing that no one else could have done, by hook or by crook, and whatever happened in the past will be forgotten overnight.
But above all, don't be a victim. Even if you are a victim, don't be one.
> You're going to live past 100 assuming you don't get hit by a truck or an asteroid, the game's barely started. Go do something amazing that no one else could have done, by hook or by crook, and whatever happened in the past will be forgotten overnight.
As I recall, he was given almost exactly this advice when he was having his meltdown at Google, except s/live past 100/become a productive employee/ . It didn't seem to help.
I've known plenty of smart people who didn't get anywhere in their career. Why? Lots of different reasons, ranging from personality, lack of communication skills, entitlement issues, lack of self control, etc. Sometimes all of those reasons.
If you are in a tough spot in your career, try to be honest with yourself about how/where you can improve, and make an effort to improve. At 30, it sounds like you are looking for instant gratification.
My recommendation: stop getting on these boards talking negatively and using profanity. It's not helping. Start bringing relevant insight and commentary that highlights your skills. Be open to constructive feedback from friends and colleagues. Work to improve. It may take a few years to rebuild - but think of it this way: 5 years is an eternity in the tech world. If you do things right for 5 years you may have an entirely different outlook.
A company that deliberately allows them to thrive for supposed project expediency gains has no right to use the motto: Don't Be Evil.
"Don't Be Evil" is such a conflated concept at Google. It sounds that you were fooled by it. Get real. Google's primary goal is to benefit itself. Good news [for users] is that benefiting the user is usually what benefits Google the most. Righting wrongs in HR issues that would expose Google as an employer to potential lawsuit liabilities and negative PR is not. Don't be so fucking idealistic.
Does shit happens deliberately? No, it's just the law of large numbers at Google's size today. However, covering up the shit is sometimes rational and evolutionary. How many start-ups die because they don't deal with HR issues the "right" way?
You were unlucky, but you also lack the tact to deal with your situation. Your years of experience and your 150 IQ didn't help, so what makes you think you would fare better as an EIR?
If you paid for anything contact the companies that are already tired of us and have them solve your problem. Oh and by the way, try our new Google Play Game Service! Hurry, before it's gone!